PTL publishes all its journals in full partial open access, meaning unlimited use and reuse of articles, in addition to giving credit to the authors. All our articles are published under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license.

Authors pay a one-time Article Processing Charge (APC) to cover the costs of peer review administration and management, professional production of articles in PDF and other formats, and dissemination of published papers in various venues, in addition to other publishing functions however currently we do not charge any extra amount for open access publishing. Please note that the option to process an advance payment remains but does not guarantee the acceptance of manuscripts. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article, figures or supplementary data. Some items (Editorials, Corrections, Addendums, Retractions, Comments, etc.) are published free of charge.

Here is a breakdown of how our APCs are used. In calculating these values, we have followed recommendations from the Fair Open Access Alliance, an organization that promotes sustainable and transparent scholarly open access publishing. This also makes PTL fully compliant with the requirements of Plan S, a key funder initiative to promote Open Access.

1. Publishing Operations & Projects

PTL develops and maintains its electronic submission and peer-review website. We also run several platforms to offer different types of services for scholars.

• Preprints.org: a multidisciplinary preprint platform where authors can publish their articles free of charge.

• Scilit.net: a comprehensive, free database for scientists using a new method to collate data and index scientific material.

• Sciforum.org: an event-planning platform that supports open science by offering the opportunity to host and participate in academic conferences.

• Sciprofiles.com: a researcher-profile platform.

1. Journal publication

• Triaging—Filtering of papers upon submission by internal staff and editorial board members.

• Organization of peer-review—PTL provides a high degree of assistance to Academic Editors so that they can only focus on editorial decisions. We employ in-house editors to invite reviewers, collect review reports, communicate with authors and reviewers, correspond with authors about revision, etc.

• Production—including copy-editing, typesetting, copy-editing XML and PDF conversion, and language editing. PTL provides English editing by native English speakers for all accepted papers, included in the APC.

• Proofreading—Corresponding with authors to approve the final text and requesting any missing information.

• Other Editorial assistance—Handling any questions and requests for support before submission, during the editorial and peer-review process, or post-publication.

• Journal management & development—The in-house Managing Editors track key performance indicators of each journal, monitor competing journals and the trends in the field. They also provide reports and hold discussions with the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board.

• Indexing & archiving—PTL has a team dedicated to indexing relations that advise on the eligibility of a journal for application to be indexed in over 80 databases. Our team communicate closely with the contact persons at the different databases and receive regular updates on the status of applications. We dedicate time to keep ourselves up to date on any changes in the evaluation criteria or application procedure.

• Long term preservation—PTL supports long-term preservation of all its articles in CLOCKSS.

1. Editorial Fees

PTL pays a travel grant or stipends to all Editors-in-Chief and a share of revenue to the societies whose journals it publishes.

1. Marketing and Communication

PTL allocates part of its income to the promotion of journals and articles through sponsorships of conferences, scholarly society events, and other promotional activities, as well as a series of awards to support researchers.

1. General

• Management & administration include costs related to salaries of non-editorial staff and other business costs. They include all the fees paid by PTL for membership in publishing organizations: STM Association, OASPA, SSP, as well as services such as Publons. Most membership fees are based on the level of income or size of the publisher.

• Taxes.

• PTL supports the activities of the PTL Sustainability Foundation, including coordinating the World Sustainability Forum and World Sustainability Awards.

• PTL is a debt-free company and is not repaying loans or investments.

1. Discounts and waivers

PTL waives up to 15% of its content every year. We are committed to supporting the transition of all research to full open access, so offer APC waivers or discounts to some authors. Even some of our well established indexed journals waive 30% of publishing costs per year.

Members of societies affiliated with a PTL journal benefit from a discount as well as authors affiliated with institutions participating in our Institutional Open Access Program.

For journals in fields with low levels of funding, where authors typically do not have funds available, APCs are typically waived and cross-subsidized from fields for which more APC funding is available. For authors from low- and middle-income countries, waivers or discounts may be granted on a case-by-case basis. Applications submitted before article submission are assessed by the Managing Editor based on the quality of the research article and the authors’ ability to pay.